Volume 50, Number 3 · February 27, 2003
'A Lone Left Thing'
By John Updike
Marsden Hartley
Catalog of the exhibition edited byElizabeth Mankin Kornhauser
an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, January 17–April 20, 2003; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., June 7–September 7, 2003; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri,October 11, 2003–January 11, 2004.
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 334 pp., $55.00; $34.95 (paper)
My Dear Stieglitz: Letters of Marsden Hartley and Alfred Stieglitz, 1912–1915
edited by James Timothy Voorhies
University of South Carolina Press, 236 pp., $39.95
The something woebegone about Marsden Hartley—that long ponderous face, those haunted pale eyes, those wide-brimmed black hats—has dampened his reputation. Born of English immigrant parents in the dismal mill town of Lewiston, Maine, he was wounded by the death of his mother when he was eight and a subsequent dispersal of his family that placed him in the care of an older sister; he became, he later wrote, 'in psychology an orphan, in consciousness a lone left thing to make its way out for all time after that by itself.' Homosexual, homely, egocentric, shy, slow to develop as an artist, pious in an Emersonian-Episcopalian way, he became a global drifter, largely in Europe but including Mexico and Nova Scotia as, perennially short of cash, he occupied a succession of rented, shared, or borrowed quarters. At the age of sixty he returned, part-time, to Maine, dying there at sixty-six, in the middle of World War II, just as his paintings were beginning to sell and he had, for the first time ever, some spare money.
Review, 3100 words
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